What, in the name of Jehovah…

It looks to me like a cherry tomato got given the kiss of life by a magic chipmunk.

Anyway, the species isn’t important. The point is, that this came out of a Kinder egg. Which I’m sure last time I checked (circa 1989) was all about getting a load of tiny bits of plastic out of a small yellow capsule, which you then fed to your baby sister? Or alternatively, if you were a little more gifted than I was, you assembled the pieces into some kind of multi-coloured dumper truck, crocodile, or self-propelled dinosaur, using a sort of cartoon strip / manga style instruction leaflet. Then there was the feeling of utter triumph when you eventually finished and held aloft your creation, which was by this stage entirely coated in a thick layer of mungy chocolate.

And then you pulled it back a couple of yards on its tiny wheels and off it zoomed under the fridge, never to be seen again. Or something.

What you definitely did not expect to find having spent a good ten minutes putting all the pressure that eight year old fingers can muster right on the join of the pod, until it popped open sending tiny jointed limbs all over the floor, was a tiny, red, demented looking squirrel grinning up at you, fully assembled. I feel cheated. I feel especially cheated because it wasn’t my Kinder egg in the first place, so I didn’t even get to enjoy the mungy chocolate.

More to the point, is there a factory somewhere where people get paid to put the little bits of plastic together now, for all the lazy kids who stopped buying Kinder surprise when they realised there was some work involved – because where’s the fun in that?